Missing friends
One Liverpool private detective specialised in finding 'missing friends' - often young women - in the Victorian city
Liverpool in the 1890s, when Thomas Lucan was working as a private detective
Thomas Lucan established his Liverpool detective agency in 1877, using premises at South Castle Street as his base. He specialised in finding missing people, with one of his key strategies being to advertise in local papers for the missing to contact him – a way of investigating without leaving his desk.
In 1882, he was trying to find a Miss Leigh, aged 21, who was known to have been ‘despondent’; in 1893, he was advertising for a woman named Bessie to return home and ‘think of [her] mother’ who would forgive and forget anything she had done if she just came home. Lucan’s telegraph address was ‘secrecy’, and he stressed that his office was always open so that ‘missing friends’ could contact him.
Liverpool was a lucrative place for a detective; its location and history as a place where you could get on a boat and vanish meant there were numerous missing people to find, as well as thefts and fraud to investigate along the docks. It was no wonder that Lucan, a native of Preston, had sought to establish himself in the city. He also had little need for hyperbole. I’ve found many private detectives boasting of having established themselves years earlier than they actually had, in order to make themselves appear more experienced, but Lucan genuinely was working as a detective by 1877 – his marriage in Manchester on 7 November that year stated that he was a detective.
Lucan was born in Preston in 1846, the son of a coach builder. He may have been indentured into the Merchant Navy at the tender age of 13, before changing career. As with many other private detectives, he took on other administrative tasks to make a living, working as a clerk and an accountant; he was also a Freemason, a sure sign of respectability. Yet he had longevity: the 1891 and 1901 censuses continue to record Lucan as a private inquiry agent, living across the Mersey in Birkenhead. Only in 1911 does his stated occupation change to ‘private financial agent’, but this again reflects the fact that many private detectives took on accountancy-type work alongside their investigative tasks. He continued working well into his 60s, one of Liverpool’s many longstanding private detectives.